Exhibit Exploring Ties Between Native and African Americans to Close

Suffern, NY (UCTP Taino News) – The exhibit, "IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas" is on view at Rockland Community College through March 9 as part of school’s Black History Month celebration. The exhibition explores the complex relationships between Native Americans and African-Americans.

According to the exhibit: "African and Native peoples came together in the Americas . Over centuries, African-Americans and Native Americans created shared histories, communities, families and ways of life. Prejudice, laws and twists of history have often divided them from others, yet African-Native American people were united in the struggle against slavery and dispossession, and then for self-determination and freedom."

This Saturday, February 26, a day long program delving deeper into the issues will take place at Rockland Community College Tech Center, 2nd Floor, 145 College Rd., in Suffern, NY. This special closing program will feature musical and dance presentations, story-telling, personal reflections, and theatrical readings. Saturday’s program will also feature two distinguished lectures including “What Does a Real Indian Look Like?” by Prof. Heriberto Dixon and “Native American-Caribbean Connections” by Roberto Múkaro Agueibana Borrero (Taíno).

A closing blessing will be shared by Sachem (Chief) Dwaine Perry of the Ramapo Mountain Indians of New Jersey. For further information about the exhibition or the program call (845) 574-4396.

UCTPTN 02.22.2011

FDU Hosts Presentation about the U.N. and Indigenous Peoples

TEANECK, NJ — “Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations” is the topic that a United Nations panel will present on and discuss on November 17, 2010, at 6:30 p.m. at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Metropolitan Campus, Teaneck, N.J. as part of FDU’s United Nations Pathways program.

The opportunity to attend this presentation is free and open to the public. The presentation will begin at 6:30 p.m. with a traditional welcome and cultural presentation from Chief Dwaine Perry. The film “Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Vol. 1” will be screened and following that will be a panel discussion by Roberto Borrero and Tonya Gonnella Frichner. The event will conclude at 8 p.m.

Perry is the chief of the Ramapough Mountain Indian Nation, who are the descendants of the Lenape people. The Ramapough Indians are a group of approximately 5,000 people living around the Ramapo Mountains of northern New Jersey and southern New York.

Borrero is the current chairperson of the NGO Committee on the United Nations International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. He is a member of the Boriken Taino indigenous community and respected advocate for indigenous rights. The Boriken Taino are native to Puerto Rico.

Frichner is an attorney and the founder and president of the American Indian Law Alliance, an NGO in Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. She is a member of the Onondaga Nation, Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy.

Fairleigh Dickinson’s Office of Global Learning, in collaboration with the N.G.O. Committee on the United Nations International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, and Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, presents this program.

The program is being held in the Rutherford Room in the Student Union Building. Fairleigh Dickinson is located at 1000 River Road, Teaneck, N.J. For additional information, call FDU’s Office of Global Learning at (973) 443-8876.